Remote Avant-Garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation
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Remote Avant-Garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation
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| ISBN-13: | 9780822374602 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/04/2016 |
| Series: | Objects/Histories |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 35 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Remote Avant-Garde
Aboriginal Art Under Occupation
By Jennifer Loureide Biddle
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7460-2
CHAPTER 1
HUMANITARIAN IMPERIALISM
* * *
When is it that living in a remote Indigenous community, speaking an Indigenous language, might be seen as an advantage rather than an impediment?
Mick Dodson | director, National Centre for Indigenous Studies and professor of law, ANU, launching the University of New South Wales Indigenous Policy and Dialogue Research Unit
It is difficult to write about crisis, emergency, trauma, without evoking it. If affects are ultimately judgments, as Teresa Brennan (2004) crucially noted — bodily responses that take a stance, literally — then to write about trauma is to invoke judgment. Affects are anything but neutral, as Silvan Tomkins (1963) first modeled. Primarily energetic forces that enhance or deplete, affects switch on or off, are good or bad, positive or negative. Judgment, even if only a momentary shift in attitude, orientation, or posture, takes place.
This first chapter is about trauma, affect, and the visual in relation to the Australian Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) — also known as the Intervention or Stop the Gap, articulated into a fully fledged ten-year national framework and passed with bipartisan Parliament support in 2012, now called the Stronger Futures policy — the context of national crisis that underpins the conditions of emergence of all of the artworks in this book.
My interest is in how it is that visual images (nonart and art both) operate in the public sphere to engender collective feelings, sentiment, and active response. Following the work of Lauren Berlant (2011), Nigel Thrift (2004), Brian Massumi (2002), and others, my concern is with how the public sphere has, over the past decade, become less a place for information exchange or rational debate than a site of identification-based politics. Berlant (2011, 224) argues that a new mode of participatory citizenship and obligatory practice based on affect — an "affect of feeling political together" — defines the contemporary. Political allegiance is no longer secured by policy, platform, or party but by "affective binding": modes and structures that generate immediate and proximate "feelingful" attachments; investments and actions that bind the individual to the body collective by the operation of affect.
The title of this chapter, "Humanitarian Imperialism," flags a new postwar mood in this terrain. Humanitarian imperialism is not, of course, my own term but one I borrow from the works of Jean Bricmont (2006) and Noam Chomsky (2008), among others. Put simply, humanitarian imperialism refers to the new imperial political right — if not obligation — to intervene by economic sanction, policy framework, or military force on the grounds of averting the abuse of human rights. Human rights ideals are increasingly utilized to adjudicate national and international relations, replacing more traditional First World notions of freedom, democracy, and justice. Banners of protection, safeguarding, peace building, and restitution now cluster around tropes of care and compassion (particularly in relation to children) to justify political, economic, and military intervention. Purported abuses of human rights champion a moral right to intervene, where "right" becomes "righteous," in a certain "we know better than you do and only we can give you ultimately what is best for you" sense. According to the new logic of right, the suffering and trauma of others — "humanitarian crises" — incite a legitimate imperative to respond to injustice with altruistic force; an ethical and honorable society is shaped by responding to, and ameliorating, the pain and suffering of others. The new politics of human rights and the "right to intervene," which, at least in principle, emerged historically as an assertion of the "power of the powerless," has since become an agenda of the "power of the powerful" (see Whyte 2012).
Humanitarian imperialism is, in this sense, a new public expressive mood, both symptomatic and productive. It is symptomatic of the contemporary because it provides indexes of complex social processes, condensing and rearticulating what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call "blocks of affect," that is, precognitive intensities, sensations, and orientations that aggregate and assemble collective bodies sympathetically. Humanitarian imperialism is productive because such a mood does not represent social process but actively participates and produces its terms.
It is the call to action that operates at once at both a public and a personal level that I am most interested in here; how the force of "feeling political together" operates to produce shared, deeply felt wounds as well as healing, that work collectively to compel action. That is, I am interested in the workings and structure of what I call humanitarian instrumental trauma as it has served to engender affective action in relation to the NTER emergency. How is it that images — concrete, material — can make us "do" something through feeling? And specifically, what, in turn, might Aboriginal images mobilize or set in motion, or what might they do differently themselves?
i
In 2007, the Northern Territory government released a commissioned report from the Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse, The Little Children Are Sacred, describing crisis levels of child sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. This led to the national Australian Commonwealth Government seizing, by compulsory acquisition, seventy-three remote Aboriginal townships and communities directly, originally deploying over six hundred soldiers and detachments to "stabilize and normalize" what was constructed as an emergency national humanitarian crisis. The NTER Intervention targeted the (purported) "shock and awe" (Altman and Hinkson 2012) dysfunction of remote Aboriginal community life, including pornography rings, rampant child sexual abuse, alcoholism, criminality, domestic violence, unemployment, welfare dependency, infant mortality, overcrowding, and other statistically measured indicators of Aboriginal inequity and delinquency. The remote communities targeted were not only all of the major Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory, Arnhem Land, and Cape York but included the Aboriginal town camps of Alice Springs, Darwin, Katherine, and Tennant Creek.
It needs to be stressed that the NTER Intervention does not target the entire Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory or, indeed, of Australia as a whole. Rather, the Intervention specifically targets geophysical places in which not only are Aboriginal people in the majority, but Aboriginal ways of living are most visible — highlighting the dependency of the NTER Intervention on visibility itself and, in turn, the kinds of countervisibilities at stake for emergent remote Aboriginal art.
The deployment of Australian Defence Force military police to targeted remote communities ceased formally in October 2008. However, since that time an increasing number of institutions, agencies, and government personnel (under federally funded NTER new statutory laws and agreements) have now replaced established Aboriginal local councils and Traditional Owner authorities of self-governance. Local Aboriginal councils and authorities in the remote sector had been in development since the 1970s when, following the original granting to Aboriginal people of Land Rights and equal pay, and to Aboriginal children the right to learn in their own Indigenous languages at school, Aboriginal self-determination first became a national Australian policy priority. What the NTER Intervention effectively ended was four decades of localized Indigenous control and community-directed management. Aboriginal "self-determination" is no longer a national policy or priority (Altman and Hinkson 2012; Maddison 2009).
A marked increase in police presence and powers throughout remote Aboriginal Australia has followed. The introduction of new national statutory reform legislation has resulted in transformations in health policy and its priorities (including the introduction of mandatory child protection "checkups"); the compulsory leasing by Aboriginal people of Aboriginal lands, and of housing in traditional Aboriginal countries; the appearance of new training, housing, land, and resource offices, with their officers, in all remote Aboriginal communities; and tenancy and truancy commissions with explicit powers to regulate welfare expenditure, oversee training and development, curtail purchase and consumption of alcohol, and ensure attendance at school by all Aboriginal school-aged children. The right to remove Aboriginal children from their families, under new national protectionist legislation, has once again been made legal national policy. Child removal rates have tripled in the Northern Territory since 2000, and the Productivity Commission's report Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage in 2014 showed a disproportionate yearly rise in the number of Indigenous children removed from their families for care and protection purposes since the national Apology to Australia's Indigenous People in 2008 (McQuire 2014; Sleath 2015).
In the face of such draconian humanitarian intervention measures, Aboriginal literacy remains a more subtle imperial initiative, one that is rarely challenged because of its pervasive affective assumptions and force — and, as I argue, more devastating because of its all-persuasive logics. The sovereignty of Indigenous aesthetics — that is, to speak, to write, to read, and indeed to live life in vernacular terms today — is directly at risk in national Australian literacy platforms and policy specifically.
Literacy is itself a recognized human right — part of the UN Charter since 1958 — and UNESCO'S decade-long campaign to combat global disadvantage figured "Literacy as Freedom" (2003–13). In this context, to even imagine feeling good about Aboriginal illiteracy is anathema. And herein lies the rub. How is it that Aboriginal illiteracy has become assumed, feared, acted upon — tethered, as if in a magic wand way, to the greater humanitarian agenda of combating poverty, marginality, malnutrition, and unemployment, despite the fact that literacy has not been shown to be a solution to any of these factors directly (Olson and Torrance 2001) and, moreover, despite the fact that Aboriginal illiteracy has not, in fact, been proven?
ii
* * *
Let us resolve over the next five years to have every Indigenous four-year-old in a remote Aboriginal community enrolled and attending a proper early childhood education centre or opportunity and engaged in proper preliteracy and prenumeracy programs. Let us resolve to build new educational opportunities for these little ones, year by year, step by step, following the completion of their crucial preschool year. Let us resolve to use this systematic approach to building future educational opportunities for Indigenous children to provide proper primary and preventative health care for the same children, to begin the task of rolling back the obscenity that we find today in infant mortality rates in remote Indigenous communities — up to four times higher than in other communities.
Kevin Rudd | prime minister of Australia, "Apology to Australia's Indigenous People," House of Representatives, Parliament House, Canberra, February 13, 2008
The long-awaited, fiercely advocated Apology to the Stolen Generation, which was finally delivered in 2008, changed little for remote Central and Western Desert Aboriginal people. In his formal apology to the thousands of Aboriginal people who had, under Australian government state and national policies, been forcibly removed from their families to be raised in missions or adopted out to non-Aboriginal families, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd not only failed to revoke the 2007 NTER Intervention but subtly enshrined its continued need. Defined in terms of comparative norms, Aboriginal people, in his account, are failing to meet national benchmarks in a country priding itself on providing "a fair go for all Australians." Aborigines represent what he called "a gap that needs to be lessened" in mortality rates, health, literacy levels, educational achievement, and employment outcomes. Rudd evinced no sense of an awareness of Aboriginal lifeworlds, or ways of doing and being that might, in fact, have their own measures of what it means to be human, to be Australian even, nor any sense that the aspects of "obscene disparity" that he pinpointed — literacy, education, employment — might, in fact, be representative of contemporary Aboriginal culture as strategies of resilience, resistance, and survival, to combat the continuing policies of assimilation purportedly under redress.
Rudd insisted that future policy must "begin with the little children": early childhood intervention programs in education and health, and preschool accelerated literacy and numeracy programs.
In response to national pressure, the Northern Territory minister for education, Alison Anderson, instigated an unprecedented mandate. Without consultation, and in the face of decades of hard-won Aboriginal bilingual educational practice, she proclaimed, in October 2008, that for four hours per day, teaching in all Northern Territory schools was to be in English only. Overnight, this legislation effectively put an end to the culturally appropriate, Aboriginal language–supported, bilingual or two-way education that had distinguished remote Aboriginal schools for almost three decades (and in Ngaanyatjarra and Pitjantjatjara lands since the 1930s, under United Aboriginal Missions [UAM] schooling; see Eickelkamp 2001; chapter 3, this volume). Anderson, one of Australia's most senior Aboriginal parliamentarians (and speaker of no less than six Indigenous languages herself, according to her Wikipedia page), was quoted as saying, "Indigenous children should be taught in the same way as students in Sydney. ... I am not suggesting we abandon our traditional culture or language but teaching them should not be done in schools, it should be done after school and on weekends, and during the holidays" (Hind 2012).
Thus, the right of Aboriginal children to learn in their first and primary language, an Indigenous language, is now officially no longer recognized in Australia — this despite the fact that the right of Indigenous communities to maintain and strengthen their languages, and to determine how their children are to be educated at school, is now formally recognized as a human right by the United Nations, developed in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, passed by the General Assembly in 2007, and, in fact, signed by the Australian government in 2009 (Simpson, Caffery, and McConvell 2009).
The year 2008 also saw the first national standard and testing measures for pan-Australian literacy and numeracy, the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), rolled out by the federal government. For the first time, NAPLAN instigated national benchmark standardized testing across Australia for all children, regardless of their ethnic, economic, or English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language status. All Australian children are now tested throughout their schooling in years three, five, seven, and nine. The program assesses and ranks literacy and numeracy as a diagnostic and remedial tool, to test whether children are meeting national literacy and numeracy benchmarks and, if so, how. The results of pan-Australian testing now compare student performances, and thereby the success of schools, across the entire nation. Students and schools are ranked comparatively according to their performative success, on the basis of standardized literacy and numeracy indicators alone — rankings that are now regularly and publicly posted on the new government-supported web platform My School (www.myschool.edu.au).
The results of the first NAPLAN test in 2008 showed that Aboriginal children in remote communities had the lowest national test scores of all Australian children. The consequence of these results was not only the cessation of bilingual education but also the introduction of early numeracy and literacy programs into most major remote Aboriginal communities (the First Steps Program), with mandatory attendance required by all Aboriginal children under the age of five in remote communities. Aboriginal literacy, specifically, is a targeted aspect of a greater national push for a brighter, better-educated future for "all Australians." It is a national aim of the Stronger Futures policy to achieve measurable improvements in Aboriginal numeracy and literacy rates and to double their current numbers by the year 2016.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations viiAcknowledgments xiii
Introduction. The Imperative to Experiment 1
1. Humanitarian Imperialism 21
Part I. Biliteracies
2. Tangentyere Artists 41
3. June Walkutjukurr Richards 77
4. Rhonda Unurupa Dick 91
Part II. Hapticities
5. Tjanpi Desert Weavers 109
6. Warnayaka Art: Yurlpa 139
7. Yarrenyty Arltere Artists 159
Part III. Happenings
8. Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route 181
9. The Warburton Arts Project 197
Epilogue: (Not) a "Lifestyle Choice" 217
Notes 221
Further Resources 233
References 235
Index 257
What People are Saying About This
"Introducing an entire complex array of art, film, and digital forms, Jennifer Loureide Biddle destabilizes standard divisions between urban and remote Indigenous arts and politics, and between art as representation and art as performative social intervention. She does this all while simultaneously moving readers into the social complexity of Western Desert Indigenous art and outward into contemporary Australia's broader social politics of culture and arts. Remote Avant-Garde is a tour de force of aesthetic life under settler occupation that moves approaches to art, politics, and aesthetic theory in new and exciting directions."
"The extraordinary variety of mixed-media arts in outback Australia has not found its scholarly champion. Until now. Drawing on years of immersion in these embattled communities, a complete grasp of relevant theory, and a sympathetic eye, Jennifer Loureide Biddle highlights the painted evocations of everyday life in the town camps around Alice Springs, the animated hybrids of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers, and the Yarrenyty Arltere artists, as well as three exceptional curatorial interventions. In so doing, she demonstrates how Australian Indigenous artists are fighting back, through their ingenious aesthetic, against the degradations that continue to be visited upon them by uncomprehending governments."